Although it’ll start with him, this post really isn’t about Dave Hersh.
It’s about how talking about not talking to Dave led to a lot of buzz for a young PIE startup called Revisu.
Some quick background: Amongst other things, Revisu lets folks append comments to files, specifically design files, whether they have the software that created those files or not.
So back to Dave.
PIE mentor, Jive COB and all-around awesome guy Dave Hersh was in PIE meeting with startups this week. Unfortunately, Revisu’s co-founders, Clifton (@maxticket) and Brad (@bradhe) didn’t get time to talk with him, but then spotted him later in a nearby bar, talking with a friend. They wanted to say hello to this well-respected VC and advisor, but didn’t want to interrupt him. So they did what any self-respecting hacker co-founders who had trouble working up the gumption to talk IRL would do – they shared their quandry on Hacker News (HN) in a post entitled “Ask HN: Hey VCs, do you mind if ppl intro themselves when you’re out at a bar?”
This post resulted in Union Square Partners VC Fred Wilson responding with a blog post of his own entitled: “Should you introduce yourself to me at a bar?” His reply, in summary, was: be quick, be memorable, be considerate, but hell yeah. And that post spawned hundreds of replies.
One of them from @FAKEGRIMLOCK. Yes, that @FAKEGRIMLOCK. The giant robot dinosaur.
Clifton saw the comment and further up the twitter stream read an earlier post from @fakegrimlock that indicated he wasn’t crazy about the new new twitter redesign:
Clifton asked @FAKEGRIMLOCK whether he’d like to provide some color commentary on the Twitter redesign. When the giant robot dinosaur agreed, Clifton pinged his network to get older Twitter screenshots into Revisu, then sent the link to @FAKEGRIMLOCK, who proceeded to annotate them. Here’s one comment (read them all here, before the non-famous get there):
Once done, @FAKEGRIMLOCK tweeted his handiwork to his thousands of followers, who in turn retweeted it to their friends, and drove so much traffic to Revisu it crashed their servers.
The best? PIE startup Cloudability quickly helped Revisu get back online – and earned a @FAKEGRIMLOCK award (and unquestionably their best testimonial EVER):
What started as a conversation about not having a conversation became a high profile product demo by a benevolent internet rockstar. FAKEGRIMLOCK wins at internet, Revisu shows what its product can do, Cloudability saves the day.
Thank you, Dave Hersh!
